About Manchester Writing School
Established in 1998, the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University is a thriving centre of creative excellence and one of the UK’s biggest and most successful literary centres.
About us
One of the greatest pleasures of my working life continues to be the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, a department with a real sense of family, achievement and celebration, and an ethos of nurturing and innovation.
More than 100 of our students and graduates have embarked upon literary careers, launching first books and having work produced, with many more achieving publication in journals and magazines, winning writing awards and prizes, setting up small presses and anthologies, and finding roles in the publishing industry. Our alumni include winners of the Costa First Novel Award, Forward Poetry Prize and Yale Windham-Campell Prize.
The school’s Creative Director is Carol Ann Duffy DBE (UK Poet Laureate 2009-2019), and she teaches alongside a team of distinguished practising writers, critics and industry experts. We also host high-profile Visiting Fellows who contribute to Manchester Writing School teaching, projects and public events. We’re based in the wider Department of English, and together our results in the latest Research Exercise Framework (REF) place us among a number of world-class English, Creative Writing and Publishing departments, with 70% of our research impact rated ‘world-leading’ and 90% ‘internationally excellent’ (see REF 2021 Results).
Our school has a strong Manchester presence, with links to many of the city’s major cultural and arts organisations, and also a global reach with students and alumni based across the UK and continental Europe, and in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia. We play a leading role in establishing Manchester as a city of writers with a commitment to finding diverse new voices and creating opportunities for writer development, enabling new writing and building audiences for the next generation of talent. Manchester has been designated a UNESCO City of Literature in recognition of its thriving live literature scene, with a year-round programme of author events, writers’ forums, networking opportunities and open mic nights.
Our annual Manchester Writing Competition seeks to celebrate Manchester as an international city of writers, finding and celebrating diverse new voices from around the world and creating opportunities for writer development. The competition has awarded more than £195,000 to writers. We also run the Quiet Man Dave Prize, which celebrates short-form writing and the life of someone who loved to experience new places, art and events and write about them.
We also work closely with Manchester Metropolitan’s Manchester Poetry Library which hosts an extensive collection of contemporary poetry books and recordings in multiple languages, and is an exciting public venue for a whole range of literary and arts events and projects, including book launches and author panels. We are home to a suite of ambitious outreach projects including the Manchester Children’s Book Festival and Mother Tongue Other Tongue, an international multilingual poetry competition that celebrates cultural diversity and the many languages spoken in schools in the UK.
The Manchester Writing School offers opportunities to study at BA, Masters and PhD level. Find out more on our Courses page.
